With Intel's new Haswell chip, manufacturers can choose to either build slimmer notebooks or try to optimize battery life as much as possible. Dell has clearly shown its dedication to the latter with the new Inspiron 11 3000 series. Budget notebooks don't always have big batteries, but Dell claims the $379 Haswell version of the Inspiron 11 lasts up to eight hours and 20 minutes on a single charge.

Something I've been pondering for a while: if we can have high-quality tablets and smartphones at low prices, why can't we have high-quality laptops at said prices too? Cheap laptops are almost always crap, but this Inspiron 11 actually looks like it could reverse the trend. Since I don't really need an expensive laptop anymore, a cheap but still relatively high quality 11" laptop is right up my alley. Is anyone aware of any alternatives?

Because it's not a design issue.
It's a search based interface like in unity, osx's spotlight/alfred, KDE's krunner, etc.
It also presents a large number of installed items in a manner that is easier to browse when accessing the all programs section.

start menu addons are there for people who cling to an arbitrary behaviour, just like those who can't let go of gnome2.

Care to add what those problems are?
It has more functionality, better organisation of functionality, a cleaner appearance, lower resource usage (significantly so for disk space), they finally brought in an app store, and oh so many more improvements.

For the record, I use KDE on arch linux, but I have been needing to use win8.1 for .NET purposes, and have found it much nicer than 7 ever was.

I dont care for a "start menu" in full screen. Thats for me atleast would be a design error...

I am running win8 in a lab atm to test some vpn clients. I wanted to reinstall a client but it would not let me do so without admin rights. It just so happens that i only have one account with full rights on this machine. And even with those credentials i was not allowed ot uninstall the client. I had to find another way to do it. I never seen that in win7...